Applying Automation Testing with Cucumber BDD in Agile Teams

Nowadays most companies and teams plan to implement Agile software in their development process to cope up with the change. This latest trend presents a challenge for the testing teams making it difficult to manage cases and scripts that has to be maintained as per the requirement. Adopting a perfect testing method can avoid all these challenges helping to develop a successful Agile software project.

Using cucumber for testing for a behavior-driven development is one of the best approaches for agile projects. The behavior-driven development method is a testing process that uses a tool such as Cucumber.

What is Cucumber?

Cucumber is an automation testing tool based on the BDD framework that is used to write tests for web applications. It helps to execute plain-text functional descriptions as automated tests. In simple words it allows the developers to automate the functionality into an easily readable and quick to understand format which is considered one of the most amazing and outstanding features of the tool.

Here is an example of a feature file:

Feature- It gives complete information about the functionality and application purpose

Scenario- It represents a particular functionality

Given- It specifies the pre-condition

When- It performs the required action

Then- It shows the desired results

And- It combines the action

Background- Steps needed in the scenario are placed here

Benefits by using Cucumber

Cucumber BDD is a collaborative tool that is used to bring a mutual understanding to the software development teams. As the behavior scenario is written in plain language everyone can read and write it. These scenarios help the team with the following benefits:

1. It offers quick, easy setup and integration.

2. It allows the automation engineers to automatically run the scripts from test cases.

3. For all those involved in development that depend on the same scenario which are requirements, acceptance criteria, test cases, and test scripts, you don’t need to write any other artifact.

4. The acceptance tests are executed automatically, while it is performed manually by the businesses.

5. Style for writing the tests allows code reusability easily in the tests.

6. It focuses on the end-user experience.

7. Cucumber is crucial to enhance communication between the technical and non-technical members of the project.

Using Cucumber for BDD Approach to Testing

BDD is a way in which the development teams work to bridge the gap between the business and development teams. Here are a few benefits of using the BDD approach for testing:

• It encourages collaboration across the roles while building a shared understanding of the problem that needs to be resolved.
• It produces system documentation that is checked against the system’s behavior
• It works in rapid and small processes that help to increase the feedback and the flow value.

BDD in collaboration fits well with test automation because it creates a scenario that can be put in a feature file and used further for automation. The development team can be implemented each scenario in the tech specification files.

After the feature development, the files are executed that generates test reports which will not have any technical details but consist of the scenarios that they have executed.

When there is the development of this feature, the feature file is executed that generates test reports that have the scenario they have executed. After this, the analyst can cross-check if anything is missing from the feature developed as the language is easy to understand. Cucumber is one of the most popular test automation tools that apply BDD most effectively.

BDD and agile

If you are already following an agile development process BDD does not replace your existing ones it enhances it. BDD is a set of plugins that are applied to your existing process making your team able to deliver the results on a note of agile, reliability of working software to meet your organization’s evolving needs with some effort and discipline.

Winding-up

BDD in combination with Agile helps to create automation testing solutions that are robust, efficient, and easier to communicate. BDD can easily be adapted to test automation as the test uses the same scenario written by the analyst, developer, and tester.

ToXSL offers cucumber automation testing services that help the testing teams to design and implement tests while saving your time and effort!